


fossilized

by nanto



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: M/M, no one dies tho, premeditated near-death boners, soul sucking??
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-21
Updated: 2017-11-21
Packaged: 2019-02-04 22:52:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,292
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12781356
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nanto/pseuds/nanto
Summary: On plans and how some men refuse to fit into them. (McReaper)





	fossilized

**Author's Note:**

> hey! i havent written a fanfic in a few years and this kinda just hit me outta fucking nowhere so,, jsdfh! not beta or even proofread tbh qq but i hope you enjoy!!! also i have literally never stopped laughing at mccree canonly writing terrible articles abt himself so have some of that

It’s with long-gone memories drawn vivid and bright in his head that Jesse McCree lets himself get stranded on the side of the highway just outside of Santa Fe. 

Sometimes it’s memories of people he’s seen dead--he’ll rarely think of it as people he’s  _ killed,  _ killed is too personal, too much responsibility on his shoulders--sometimes it’s just that slightly-far-off memory of lives cut short. Red and brown on light-seared pavement. He’s a smart man who wants to live taking every step forward, and his mind always wills the sun to fossilize those memories quicker than their proper time.

But it’s not with heavy heart he walks out, a short way away from the highway, a half-mile into the desert. (This far, without much more than a flask and a water bottle, with no message sent to anyone about where he’s gone, no tracker on him, it’s asking to tempt death. It’s asking to tempt death.)

The memories bright in his mind are so far away from this time and place. Cool, clean white walls. State-of-the-art equipment. Tables. Chairs. So many tables and chairs. For every ten people in Deadlock, there had been three chairs. For every three people in Blackwatch, ten.

Empty audiences.

Presentations, the commanding voice of a man who always put so much effort and detail into plans that were never really followed by most of his more valuable agents. So many powerpoints, so many bullet points. And threats about following them that had always set McCree’s nerves on edge.

Jesse McCree has grown quite a lot since he was seventeen, but he never did lose his attraction to trouble. To chaos. Well-intended or not.

There’s something blandly unattractive about a man who lives by plans. He’s always thought that. But the more you judge a man, the more you try to provoke him. Force him to give you a satisfying answer to the questions you didn’t admit you wanted to ask. Why the fuck do we need to follow a plan? Don’t we always get the damn objective done? Why bother making it in the first place?

_ Stick to the plan.  _ He can still, so many years later, see the way derision curled at the shape of Gabriel's lips and mustache in a way a young Jesse had wanted to smash under his palm until the man responsible for that high-and-mighty expression gave to something else.

Out here, years later and stranded in the desert, he knows there’s something, some inhuman, fucked-beyond-comprehension pile of cells, that’s still trying to work out the role Jesse McCree is meant to consistently play in his plans.

_ You can’t predict me, but I can predict you.  _

Later, he’ll probably sit at the bar, sun-sore and dehydrated, drinking whiskey just to make it that much worse and typing out a new think-piece to submit to a local rag under a pen-name, about wraiths in the desert. The essence of men long-gone, long-lost, turned to offal on the sand as traces of their past deeds sift into nothing but disjointed memories held by people who don’t think about them anymore. How those wraiths refuse to leave, unsatisfied by the impact they left, unsatisfied by the outcomes of their plans, unsatisfied that

no one

_ appreciated _ everything they did.

Jesse McCree stands in the desert, and waits to be swept away. Punished for misdeeds he didn’t do. He started trouble, he refused to be written neatly into bullet-points, but he never put his commanding officer’s head on the block. He did _ that  _ to himself. There’s nothing Jesse could have done.

_ There’s nothing I could have done. Nothing he would let me do. _

He doesn’t regret that. Gabriel’s fucking mania, dressed up in pretty bullet-pointed plans, is why McCree’s never been able to depose the man--that knife of a man, so sharp and precise and shining so pretty in his least attractive hours--from where he’s lodged in his chest.

The sun takes its time searing _ that _ memory into the past.

It’s with the memory of blindingly-white presentations and stark black bullet points in his mind that Jesse McCree--eyes shut persistently--feels that familiar unnatural sweep of black overtake his vision, and start drawing the energy straight out of him. Sucking his soul out through his bones, that’s how he’ll describe it when he writes about it later.

“Ha-ha-ha…” he rasps, his young man’s mind sometimes startled by how old he sounds. “Here I thought you didn’t--” For a moment nausea knocks the words out of him. He gags. “Didn’t, ha. Go after innocents.”

There’s a kind of inhuman growl from the swirl of black surrounding his form; his delirious, drained mind can’t help but laugh, comparing it to something cartoonish from his childhood. Real things don’t sound like that. Gabriel Reyes never growled at anyone.

“You’re the last thing I’d call innocent,” the cloud replies, low and almost self-satisfied, like he’s made a successful go at defining a perfectly human man who still refuses to be defined by a ghost, even so many years after their affiliation. But Jesse McCree laughs at his words anyway, giving him either the aggravation or the satisfaction. He’s found, over the years, he’s pleased with being either of these things for him.

“Break a m-man’s heart like that,” Jesse croaks, feeling his energy draining further, not even starting to tell the wraith to stop. He’ll let him use him. He always did. Just to see the anger on his face when he finds Jesse’s uses aren’t what he intended them to be.

The wraith stops (he always does) before Jesse can get any paler, any weaker. Jesse is panting but his breaths are shallow, body failing to make up for what it lacks. His heart pounds. His cock throbs. He can feel Reaper clamped tight around both.

“One more second,” the wraith around him breathes. “And your life is cut short right here.” Jesse gags and gasps at once, hips bucking into nothing. “What kind of man goes chasing death like that?” There’s a thousand insults written into his voice and a grin on a face that hasn’t formed to even give him the dignity of being looked at properly. Jesse’s eyes are clamped shut and he’s gasping again, lungs refusing to work right. 

“What… kind of plan…” he chokes out, voice thin, reedy. Old. So much older than he used to be. “Has a step… like this?”

His hips jerk needfully again at nothing but the sound of Reaper’s mocking rumble of a laugh. There’s that vivid picture in his memory, the derisive curl of Gabriel’s lip and beard. A man who was a man, but a man who was maybe never whole, the way McCree was never whole.

He opens his eyes when the smoke disappears around his body--when the pressure disappears around his heart and unsatisfied cock. He looks around, but he’s blind. The first time this happened, he rightfully panicked, cool though he always was. Now, it’s a familiar part of this dance.

He’ll get his sight back within the hour of Reaper feeding, and he’ll survive, so long as he can find his flask without being able to see it. He drops down on his back, not so opposed anyway to the sun baking him into the sand like a gory memory if he does die here from giving so much of his life force to a wraith who doesn’t really need to live anymore, maybe never really did--but not before he grips a hard hand around his aching length, the rough material of his glove chafing painfully at the skin. Never felt right without the pain.

“Bastard,” he gasps out through a grin, into the air. There’s no response.


End file.
